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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

In "Israel" there is a "state-sanctioned anti-miscegenation program" and an "Anti-Assimilation Department" which "works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men." The program "enjoys the support of the municipality and the police."
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Israel's vile anti-miscegenation squads

When the police lend support to vigilante groups hounding Jewish-Arab couples, what hope is there for coexistence?

Seth Freedman | The Guardian (UK) |29 September 2009

While the proliferation of ultra-orthodox "vigilante police" is a stain on Israeli society, their Taliban-esque actions can at least be contextualised as the inevitable consequence of religious fundamentalism gone wild. Such communities are dominated by leaders who refuse to accommodate any form of modernization or freedom of thought into their archaic systems of governance, and the emergence of "modesty squads" is simply a manifestation of such primitive and patriarchal thinking. Regardless of the reasons behind their appearance, the groups should not be tolerated by Israel's leaders, as they contravene the most basic human rights of the state's citizens.

Israeli lawmakers have a duty to clamp down hard on the mobs' extrajudicial activities, in order to prevent a localized problem spreading from isolated religious strongholds into the rest of the country's towns and cities. Yet the ultra-orthodox (rabbinic) enforcers have good reason to challenge any efforts to rein in their sheriff's posses, given that the example set by several Israeli municipalities implies that what is sauce for the religious goose is sauce for the secular gander.

While the local authorities in Petah Tikva, Kiryat Gat and elsewhere aren't sanctioning all-out violence against girls deemed behaving inappropriately, their modus operandi is no different in intent – and the targets of their self-righteous rage no more deserving of punishment – than the girls in Meah Shearim opting out of the ultra-restrictive dress code.

According to reports in the Israeli press: "A special team in the youth department of the Petah Tikva municipality will locate [Jewish] girls in the habit of meeting with men from minorities and will assist them … 'The problem of minority men is well-known,' said the chief of the youth department, Moshe Spektor. 'Our attempts to deal with this problem are real and sincere. The municipality is making an effort to examine the matter in co-operation with the police."

Of course, the "minority" in question is the Arab community – rather than any of the Jewish minorities in Israel such as those hailing from Ethiopia, Russia or South America – since it is the spectre of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles which is the cause of such abject fear among diehard Israeli nationalists, both religious and secular alike.

As reported in Ha'aretz, Kiryat Gat's state-sanctioned anti-miscegenation program's sole aim is preventing Jewish girls from becoming romantically involved with Israeli Bedouin (Arabs): The program enjoys the support of the municipality and the police, and is headed by Kiryat Gat's welfare representative, who goes to schools to warn girls of the "exploitative Arabs."

The program uses a video entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy," which features a local police officer and a woman from the Anti-Assimilation Department, a wing of the religious organisation Yad L'ahim, which works to prevent Jewish girls from dating Muslim men.

Many Jews in Israel and the diaspora frown upon the idea of their children marrying out of the flock, some even going as far as cutting their children out of their wills and mourning them as though they had died should they take a non-Jewish partner for a spouse.

While this is by no means restricted to the Jewish faith, the idea of such proscriptions being incorporated at state level – whether against Jews, Muslims or any other category of "undesirables" – is racism reminiscent of the dark days of segregationist America and pre-enlightened European states.

This week, the Times (of London) carried an illustrative and disturbing feature on the Israeli phenomenon, demonstrating the unabashed bigotry of those behind the purity patrols... That the (Israeli) police would even deign to co-operate with such poisonous and prejudiced characters and their fantasies of racial purity is indicative of the malaise gripping certain sectors of Israeli society, both at street and state level.

Whatever the more blinkered supporters of Israel's sectarianism say, day after day more evidence piles up attesting to the shocking reality behind Israel's mask of being a tolerant, equitable and democratic "country of all its citizens."

The likes of the modesty patrols and the anti-miscegenation squads belong in the furthest recesses of history, yet apparently the Israeli authorities are not only happy to tolerate their presence, but to actively support their work as well.

Were the shoe to be on the other foot, with Jews singled out for such base racial discrimination, the same people supporting such behavior now against Arabs would rightly be up in arms and demanding justice in the name of the persecuted.

But, of course, this is Israel, and therefore somehow "different" and "unique" – the standard retorts of those unable to defend Israeli crimes with any semblance of rational debate.

And while they continue banging their drums to drown out any criticism of the Israeli state, at ground level the divisive and destructive behavior continues, and another nail is driven into the coffin of coexistence in the Holy Land. (Emphasis supplied).

Israeli vigilantes target young Arab-Jewish couples

Sheera Frenkel in Pisgat Ze’ev | Times (London, UK) | Sept. 28, 2009

It’s past 10 p.m, but work has just begun for the group of vigilantes in a small white hatchback patrolling the streets of Pisgat Ze’ev — a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of east Jerusalem.

As the car crawls through the nearly empty streets, the men peer out at couples. They say they are experts at spotting those that don’t "match."

“Stop, right there. Stop the car. Is he an Arab? That dark guy...If they are both Jewish, keep the car moving!” yells out "David," a 31-year-old Jewish settler who does not use his real name. For more than a decade, David has considered it his unofficial job to patrol the streets looking for mixed Arab-Jewish couples.

“We are protecting the Jewish people, our traditions, our heritage. Some people just get mixed up. We talk to them, explain why it’s important for Jews to be with Jews,” he said.

His group, which works with police, goes by several names, including "Fire for Judaism," is composed of up to 45 men and funded by private donations. Members say they are fighting a “growing epidemic” of Arab-Jewish dating and spend as many hours as they can on patrol.

Similar groups have formed across the country, including in the southern Negev city of Beersheba, and northern port of Haifa. In Petah Tikva, a blue-collar city in the center of Israel, the municipality has formed a unit to discourage Arab-Jewish relationships. In Pisgat Ze’ev, the growing number of Arab-Jewish couples is seen as the result of more Jewish settlements in Arab east Jerusalem.

“The problem is always with Jewish girls dating Arab men. The Arab guy comes and buys them things, treats them well. They fall for it. They can’t see what they are doing,” says David.

Sarah, who asked not to use her real name, said it is men like David who are the problem, not her Arab boyfriend, Zadar. “I’m not stupid, or gullible or looking for trouble. I’m a Jewish girl who happened to meet a guy I like, who happens to be Arab. It’s my business. We have to go other places to go on dates, places where these guys won’t find us,” she said.

In Petah Tikva, municipal workers said they only sought out under-age Arab-Jewish couples when asked to intervene by parents. “This is not a racist thing. Statistically, these girls wind up in trouble. We try to step in before real harm can be done by talking to the teens, making social workers available to them. We never use force,” a spokesman said.

David says that he too, will not use force but on a recent night out, it became clear that he was prepared to do just about anything else. At the start of his patrol he caught sight of a “known problem couple." It was a young woman, stepping into a vehicle that he said was full of Arab men.

A car chase ensued through the windy mountain roads before the vehicle got away. David took down a licence plate number and called in the incident to the police. “I am doing this for her own good. She doesn’t know what she is getting into. It’s not like these guys are offering her a future.” (Emphasis supplied).

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Until Michael Hoffman's book Judaism Discovered becomes better known, the alleged historical alliance of “Christians-and-Jews-united-against-the-Muslims” will gain ever greater influence over Americans, and become ever more appropriated as a signature statement of the supposed compact which has existed for much of the history of the West. This deliriously fractured fairy tale about our ancestors’ alliances, which misleads and misdirects countless people in America--marches forward without hindrance. Judaism Discoveredcould punch a mighty hole in the Conservative campaign to forge a fake history based on the blundering claim of this “Judeo-Christian” alliance against Islam.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Dan Kosky wrote the following denial of the Israeli holocaust in Gaza in Britain's Guardian newspaper (Sept. 16, 2009), without fear of proseuction for Holocaust denial:

"Goldstone is similarly evasive over the unreliability of key 'eyewitnesses.' Like the flood of NGO publications in the immediate aftermath of the conflict (particularly those by Human Rights Watch, of which Goldstone was a board member) Goldstone’s so-called investigation is largely reliant upon 'eyewitness' Gaza testimony...On the basis of such flimsy testimony, Goldstone's recommendations are particularly sinister."

Kosky can say this about Palestinian eyewitnesses with impunity. In most of Europe no can say this about World War Two Judaic "eyewitnesses."

Judaic critics of Palestinian testimony to war crimes by Israelis are immune.

Gentile critics of Judaic testimony to war crimes by Germans are "biased, racist haters" subject to fines, imprisonment, blacklisting and termination of employment.

Truly, we are living in a Talmudic age, where the halachic diabilities assigned to gentiles are fully realized in the western world.

...For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush's eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey. The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. The decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors. Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it "a plutocratic boom."

President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top one percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

...Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington D.C. over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots...

Where were the angry "stiffs" when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock? Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days' notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism? They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

Michael Hoffman adds:

Where were the Tea party patriots when Bush lied us into the invasion of Iraq? Where was one Congressman to shout "You lie" at Bush during a joint session of Congress after it was revealed there were no "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" and the wastrel war was a fraud?

Where were the Tea party patriots when George W. Bush gave himself the power of an 18th century British monarch, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and send anyone he declared to be an "enemy combatant" --including any American citizen -- to perpetual imprisonment without trial?

Where were the tea party patriots when President Bush instituted warrantless wiretapping?

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote, signifying that our Constitution's separation of powers plan of government depended on the president, Congress and the Supreme Court acting as a natural check on each other. But "King" George made the Executive branch dominant, severely weakening the Founders' checks and balances, while the Bush regime's USA Patriot Act gave the executive branch unconstitutional law-enforcement powers.

Where was the Tea Party revolt when the protection from arbitrary arrest, found in the Magna Carta and he Constitution of the United States -- one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny in the arsenal of the Republic -- was trashed by Mr. Bush and Fox News favorite Dick Cheney? Before Bush and Cheney, only one American president had suspended habeas corpus — Abraham Lincoln, during the War for Southern Independence— and the Supreme Court duly struck down his arrogation of power.

Where were the Tea Party activists when the Bush administration commissioned Admiral John Poindexter, convicted of crooked activities in the Reagan administration, to head the Orwellian "Total Information Agency" to "data mine" every computer in America? To add insult to injury this Federal agency debuted under an emblem of blatant masonic-Illuminati symbolism.

Where were the Tea Party activists when Bush was asked about his involvement with the demonic "Skull and Bones" secret society and refused to answer, citing the oath of secrecy he took as a member of that wicked group of occult conspirators?

Obama may be evil, but the selective indignation of the current fake "Tea Party revolt," which is held within limits amenable to the neocon wing of the Republican party and its Moneybags backers, reveals the hidden hand of the Cryptocracy steering America back to the Republican reign of the rich and the continuing evisceration of our Constitution that did not start with Obama, but which reached unprecedented heights of despotism under President Bush and Vice-President Cheney --aided and abetted by the "patriot" Fox Network.

In the Sept. 24, 2009 issue of the NY Review of Books, G.W. Bowerstock makes a strong and shocking case for the ancient Greeks' widespread toleration of the sexual molestation of boys by adult males. (As Bowerstock points out, we owe the word 'pederasty' for this activity to the Greek pais for boy and erastês for lover). While Mr. Bowerstock concealed his own sympathies for most of his book review, he seems to have revealed them in his conclusion and this became a subject for a letter to the editor by this writer. His review ("Men and Boys") was of the following two books: The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World, by James Davidson, Random House, 789 pp., $45.00. Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods, by Andrew Lear and Eva Cantarella, Routledge, 262 pp., $41.95.

Here is the (as yet unpublished) letter I submitted in response:

To the Editor of the New York Review of Books

G.W. Bowersock concludes his review of the history and artifacts of ancient Greek pederasty with the statement: "The sexual life of the ancient Greeks was as variegated and inventive as its resplendent culture...To this day it stubbornly resists all modern ideologies and prejudices, and yet it had its own principles of decency."

In addition to the molestation of boys, the Greeks also practiced slavery. Can anyone imagine referring to slavery as "stubbornly resisting modern ideologies and prejudices" and possessed of its own "decency"?

Is it a "prejudice" to view the sexual molestation of youth as abhorrent, and to regard the term "decency" in connection with it as a grotesque - if not depraved - whitewash of this predation?

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

January, 2009: 10-year-old Palestinian Mona Samouni describes how she became one of the very few survivors of the extended Samouni family, after the Israeli army's slaughter in the densely populated Zeitoun district in Gaza. Warning: Contains footage of holocaust victims that some viewers may find distressing.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Goldstone report accused 'Israel' of a disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population

The Zionist media are conspiring to soften the impact of the highly embarrassing news of Judge Richard Goldstone's confirmation of widespread war crimes committed by Israeli military forces in Gaza last December and January, by spinning the Goldstone report as, "UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes."

This spin is easily revealed to be a species of Talmudic delusion by citing a solitary datum: during the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza "some 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including at least several hundred civilians; as well as 13 Israelis: 10 soldiers and 3 civilians" (New York Times).

It is obvious to everyone except the propaganda ministers who compose the headlines for the American press, that there is no equivalence between the heinous war crimes of the Israeli occupiers and the relatively ineffective armed resistance of the severely oppressed Palestinians.

A United Nations fact-finding mission investigating the three-week war in Gaza...issued a lengthy, scathing report on Tuesday (Sept. 15)...The four-member mission (is) led by Justice Richard Goldstone, a widely respected South African judge...The report, the bulk of which focused on the Israeli violations, said that during the war, Israeli forces engaged in a deliberate policy of collective punishment in furtherance of “an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population” through blockades and the destruction of food, water and sanitation systems of its people...

In one case, armored bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically flattened the chicken coops of a farm that reportedly supplied 10 percent of the Gazan egg market, killing all 31,000 chickens inside. In another, the forces carried out a strike on a sewage plant wall, sending 200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into neighboring farmland, the report said. The panel did not find a justifiable reason for the Israelis’ actions in either case.

It also found that the Israeli forces used disproportionate force against the Palestinian civilian population. In a number of cases, it said, Israeli forces launched “direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcome,” even when the facts indicated no justifiable military objective. Those incidents, the report concluded, amounted to war crimes.

Israeli forces twice shelled civilian hospitals in Gaza, but in neither case was the attack justified, the report found. In the attack on Al Quds Hospital, the shelling of the building and an adjacent ambulance facility with white phosphorus shells caused fires that took a day to extinguish, and at no point was any warning given of an imminent strike, the report said. The panel found no evidence of the enemy fire that the Israeli military cited as rationale for its attack.

Another event that the panel judged equivalent to a war crime took place in the Samouni neighborhood in Gaza City, when Israel soldiers shelled a house where soldiers had forced Palestinian civilians to gather. In seven cases, the report found, “civilians were shot while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and in some cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so.”

Israeli forces also intentionally attacked civilians in aiming a missile strike at a mosque during the early evening prayer, killing 15 people, and in firing antipersonnel flechette munitions, which release thousands of metal darts, on a crowd of family members and neighbors at a condolence tent, killing 5.
“These incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population,” the report said. The conduct of the Israeli armed forces in these instances, it said, “constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention” and as such, “give rise to individual criminal responsibility.”

Palestinian armed groups, the group found, fired repeated rockets and mortars into southern Israel. By failing to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population, those actions also “constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity,” the report said.

Responding to Israeli allegations that Palestinian fighters used civilians as human shields, the panel found that Palestinian armed groups did launch rockets from urban areas in Gaza, and that Palestinian armed groups “were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from civilians.”

However, the mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants “mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack,” the report said, nor did it find evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups “either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

The mission was tasked by United Nations Human Rights Council in April to investigate all violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law that might have been committed during the conflict. As part of Israel’s refusal to cooperate, it banned the panel members from entering the country. The panel made two visits to Gaza, entering from Egypt, but conducted the bulk of their research from Geneva.

The panel conducted 188 interviews, reviewed 10,000 pages of documents, and viewed more than 1,000 photographs and videos before drawing its conclusions. The panel said that Israel did not respond to a comprehensive list of questions, but that Palestinian authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank cooperated.